Community patrol fights crime in Pelican Narrows
Arielle Merasty loves being the eyes and ears of her community.
The 27-year-old has spent the last year working as a peacekeeper in her home of Pelican Narrows, a community located about 400 kilometres northeast of Prince Albert within the Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation.
Merasty said she signed up for peacekeeper training because she had toyed with the idea of becoming a paramedic and wanted to get her emergency medical responder certification. She was one of eight people to graduate in March as part of Pelican Narrows’ first peacekeeper program and has been patrolling the community’s streets ever since.
Working out of the band office, her duties include alerting the RCMP to serious incidents, responding to domestic violence calls and shepherding youth home if they’re out after curfew.
“It’s awesome, really,” she said. “We look out for people, make sure they’re safe and whatnot.”
Being on patrol makes people feel safer and discourages people from committing crimes, she said.
Now Merasty and her fellow peacekeepers are getting additional training to become Community Support Officers (CSOS).
By the end of the year, they will be armed with handcuffs and batons and have the authority to enforce pieces of provincial legislation including the Traffic Safety Act.
Merasty said she has enjoyed the training and thinks the additional knowledge and equipment will allow her to be safer and more effective when defusing difficult situations.
The money to train Merasty and her colleagues comes from a provincial pilot program.
Noel Busse, a spokesman for the Saskatchewan Ministry of Corrections and Policing, said the province is providing funding so nine people from Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation and 20 people from Little Pine First Nation and Poundmaker Cree Nation can take part in a six-week training program to become CSOS.
It costs $6,220 to train each CSO, plus other costs related to instructors travelling to the northern communities.
Once the officers are trained, the First Nations are responsible for paying the CSOS’ salaries.
RCMP Staff Sgt. Dean Lerat, detachment commander for Pelican Narrows, said the community’s peacekeepers have allowed the RCMP to operate more effectively, freed up officers to handle more serious calls and deter crime.
He expects that to continue once the peacekeepers graduate as CSOS.
Lerat said the RCMP is doing whatever it can to support that transition, including donating handcuffs to the new CSOS.
“When (RCMP officers) go home at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. or whatever time we go home, they’re out alone patrolling and they alert us to potential violent calls or escalation in violence or other types of mischief, whereas before we wouldn’t have known or we would have got called to a serious crime, a serious violent crime possibly,” Lerat said.
“They call us before it escalates and that’s the most important thing that they do for us and I firmly believe that they’ve prevented serious crime this year because of being visibly available to the community after hours.”
Pelican Narrows RCMP responded to three homicides in 2017 and two each year from 2014 to 2016.
So far, no homicides have been reported in 2018.
“The proof is in the pudding of the statistics,” he said.
“We haven’t had anywhere near the violent crime that we’ve had in the past four or five years, so I think that’s a strong indicator that the peacekeeper program is working,” Lerat said.
Pelican Narrows Vice Chief Weldon Mccallum said the CSO program is putting the community on a path to be able to establish its own police service.
Under the federal First Nations Policing Program, First Nations in Canada can either sign agreements to have their policing services provided by the RCMP or they can establish their own selfadministered forces.
There is only one self-administered Indigenous police force in Saskatchewan: the File Hills First Nation Police Service, which was established in 2002 and oversees Okanese, Peepeekisis, Carry the Kettle, Star Blanket and Little Black Bear First Nations.
Mccallum hopes Pelican Narrows could be the second and he is looking for money so the community can build or repurpose a station for its CSOS — a building that could one day become a police headquarters.
“We still have our work cut out for us, but we still have to keep pushing forward,” he said.
“The solutions to problems are better resolved coming from the community itself. We’re the ones that understand what the problem is and what we need to resolve it.”
Busse said the provincial pilot program was not launched with the intention of transitioning communities from having CSOS to having self-administered police forces.
“No, this program offers municipalities and First Nations the opportunity to support and enhance existing community safety services,” he said in an email.
Mccallum said even if Pelican Narrows’ CSOS don’t become members of a self-administered police force, he hopes the program may “ignite that little spark” and encourage them to become police officers so they can provide services on other First Nations.
He said it’s important to have Indigenous police officers who speak the language of the communities they ’re policing in, but there aren’t enough of them.
The RCMP aims to have at least 10 per cent of its officers self-identify as Indigenous.
As of April 1, 2017, that number was just eight per cent nationwide.
Merasty hopes she may soon be able to grow that number.
Though she looks forward to being a CSO in Pelican Narrows, she said her exposure to the RCMP in the last year has inspired her to apply for the force — and now she thinks her CSO training has set her up to be a successful applicant.
“Working with people and them already calling us officers, it just feels good and I want to become an RCMP officer now,” she said.